A Minor Miracle
The young woman rummaged through the pile of junk. The name she’d adopted was Melanie, simply because she liked it; she had no idea what her birth name was. She was blind by anyone’s standards, but the reality was that she could see only vague shapes and colours, with absolutely no detail at any distance. So far, no-one had bothered to find out what her problem was: perhaps someone who could do something about it would have been surprised and probably a little embarrassed to discover that was only myopia, a great deal of it, but nothing that couldn’t be overcome. Yet the means to correct it had never been made available to her in her near-destitute state.
Melanie worked at a state-run factory shop, a small building she groped her way to every weekday, where she assembled simple, easy things, like putting chains on bathroom plugs, keyrings and suchlike. For her efforts, she got paid just enough to get fed and have a bed some nights, but at weekends there was no place for her. That is why she was rummaging around blindly in a pile of unwanted items discarded carelessly outside the back of an abandoned house: she hoped perhaps there might be something useful to sell.
Under a chair, her blindly questing hands found a smooth surface: polished wood. She saw nothing of the lovely grain effect on top: for her it was simply a square thing, a vague brown smear. She pulled it out and felt all over it: her fingers, long used to being the only means available to find and examine such details around her as she could reach, detected the crack and hinges. She understood instantly, thus pulled it open; for her eyes, this action simply resulted in a differently shaped blur, for her fingers, it was something to explore.
Inside, her fingers found a piece of thick cloth, wrapped repeatedly around something hard. Used to things dropping and getting lost, she took it out and unwrapped it with utmost care. After a few minutes her fingers were running over what the cloth contained: two roundish things about 50mm wide, and about 15mm thick. They were such peculiar things, with cut out sections on one side and flat the other, but the other object in the cloth was even stranger: two long thin bits on each side, with a curve at each end, and then between them a pair of big loops. She was utterly mystified: she’d never felt anything like this before.
Then her hand brushed the cloth, pulling it slightly and tipping one of the round things: the sunlight caught its flat surface, and she saw the reflection as a bright, brief blur of light. Something inspired her to lift this thing and look through it. She quivered with surprise at what she saw: it was as if someone had made up an image of the world, like a fairytale or cruel trick, and shown it to her. But, this was the real world and this was what it looked like - as she had never seen it before. Quickly she grabbed the other round thing, then held that in front of her other eye - then her mouth gaped in amazement. Was this really what the world looked like?
She looked down at the spidery thing beneath her through the round things, one held in each hand in front of each of her eyes: it seemed to jump at her like a thing alive. Abruptly she realised what it was for: the rounded loops - those round things - they were supposed to go in them. Carefully she put them down, then with her fingers, long used to assembling things without looking much at what she was doing, she pushed one into each loop. Then she brought the whole lot to her face, and found that it seemed to be designed to fit her face. She pushed them onto her nose and found the curved bits went over her ears, neatly holding the whole contrivance in place. And then she got up and walked around: the whole world seemed to jump up and at her in startling, ferocious clarity. Actually she didn’t have full correction, but compared with her uncorrected vision, it was a great improvement.
The next Monday Melanie went to work again; thanks to her much improved vision was able to increase her workrate, do more complex things and thus earn more. In a few weeks she had enough to buy new lenses to replace those she’d found in the box, and thus she was on her way out of destitution.